biography

If you’ve been paying attention to pop culture lately, you might have heard the name Alexander Hamilton a few times. Lin Manuel Miranda’s wildly popular hip hop musical about the founding fathers has been making major waves on Broadway. It’s been likened to the phenomenon that surrounded Rent when the public took interest in it.

If you want to buy tickets for Hamilton online, you might be out of luck, unless you want to shell out $1000 for a ticket on StubHub that could be counterfeit, or unless you’re cool with waiting until next winter to see the most buzzed about show in years. That’s how high demand is for tickets.

I was lucky enough to attend a performance of Hamilton last week, and let me tell you – it certainly lives up to the hype. If you’re skeptical yourself, try streaming the cast recording on Amazon Prime or Spotify. The music is catchy and entirely too addicting. I find myself listening to it more often than I thought I’d want to, and that’s saying something.

The musical was inspired by Ron Chernow’s 832 page biography, Alexander Hamilton. Leave it to Lin Manuel Miranda to read such a book and think to adapt it into a hip hop musical. In addition to having written the hip hop musical In the Heights, Miranda thought Hamilton was the most hip hop founding father around: “I also believe [hip hop] is uniquely suited to tell Hamilton’s story. Because it has more words per measure than any other musical genre. It has rhythm and it has density. And if Hamilton had anything in his writings it was this density.”xContinue reading Book Spotlight: Alexander Hamilton